Excerpt from How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

From the cloud of smoke and powder, Lucy hears Ba laughing.

"Sam." She resists the urge to cry too. Needing to be stronger than herself, now. "Sam, you idiot, bao bei, you little shit." Mixing the sweet and the sour, the caress and the cuss. Like Ba. "We gotta go."

What could almost make a girl laugh is how Ba came to these hills to be a prospector. Like thousands of others he thought the yellow grass of this land, its coin-bright gleam in the sun, promised even brighter rewards. But none of those who came to dig the West reckoned on the land's parched thirst, on how it drank their sweat and strength. None of them reckoned on its stinginess. Most came too late. The riches had been dug up, dried out. The streams bore no gold. The soil bore no crops. Instead they found a far duller prize locked within the hills: coal. A man couldn't grow rich on coal, or use it to feed his eyes and imagination. Though it could feed his family, in a way, weeviled meal and scraps of meat, until his wife, wearied out by dreaming, died delivering a son. Then the cost of her feed could be diverted into a man's drink. Months of hope and savings amounting to this: a bottle of whiskey, two graves dug where they wouldn't be found. What could almost make a girl laugh-ha! ha!-is that Ba brought them here to strike it rich and now they'd kill for two silver dollars.

So they steal. Take what they need to flee town. Sam resists at first, stubborn as ever.

"We didn't hurt nobody," Sam insists.

Didn't you mean to, though? Lucy thinks. She says, "They'll make anything a crime for the likes of us. Make it law if they have to. Don't you remember?"

Sam's chin lifts, but Lucy sees Sam hesitate. On this cloudless day they both feel the lash of rain. Remembering when storm howled inside and even Ba could do nothing.

"We can't wait around," Lucy says. "Not even to bury."

Finally, Sam nods.

Excerpted from How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang. Copyright © 2020 by C Pam Zhang. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.